This article contends that liberty was already a globally connected concept during the late Middle Ages, and the Euro-American Enlightenment conception of liberty was only one of the many products of the global medieval legacies. Developing a network approach to concepts and applying it to primary sources in ten languages across Afro-Eurasia, I map how thinkers from different parts of the world contributed to the formation of the network. Recognizing this global network of liberty allows researchers to rediscover overlooked conceptualizations of liberty—as evidenced by examples of the Mongol Empire and its translingual politics with/in Europe, Persia, and China. Once innovations in specific contexts are placed back into the global network, revealed are global patterns of valorizing liberty, considering it either essential to possess or warranting caution. Both the findings and methodologies presented here prompt scholars to revisit the foundations of modern political thought from a global standpoint.

For a member of Congress to be a successful lawmaker, they must work collaboratively with their colleagues. Previous work has found that interpersonal relationships among lawmakers are a key predictor of legislative collaboration—particularly among members from opposing parties. In the wake of the events of January 6, 2021, many Democratic lawmakers claimed that their relationships with some of their Republican colleagues were irretrievably broken and they would be unable to continue collaborating with members who voted against certifying electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election. Using data on original cosponsorship and legislative effectiveness from the 115th to 117th Congresses (2017–22) we find that Republican lawmakers who voted against the certification of electoral votes lost bipartisan collaborators and saw a drastic decrease in their legislative effectiveness in the 117th Congress.

This article investigates the potential of deliberative minipublics to provide a new set of institutions for democratic renewal. Using three preregistered and identical conjoint experiments in the United States, Ireland, and Finland, it first shows that minipublics are moderately attractive institutional innovations, but that in all three country contexts, citizens in general are very reluctant to grant them empowerment and autonomy as well as ask for additional provisions (such as large size or large majorities for recommendations). Subgroup analyses, however, reveal that especially participation in minipublics as well as trust in other citizens as decision-makers in combination with low political trust produces more support for empowered and autonomous minipublics. But what stands out in the empirical analysis is that most citizens want minipublics as additions to the representative system, not as a replacement of the existing democratic infrastructure, as some minipublic advocates have suggested.

Prior studies have documented that working-class individuals rarely become parliamentarians. We know less about when in the career pipeline to parliament workers disappear, and why. We study these questions using detailed data on the universe of Swedish politicians’ careers over a 50-year period. We find roughly equal-sized declines in the proportion of workers on various rungs of the political career ladder ranging from local to national office. We reject the potential explanations that workers lack political ambition, public service motivation, honesty, or voter support. And while workers’ average high school grades and cognitive test scores are lower, this cannot explain their large promotion disadvantage, a situation that we label a class ceiling. Organizational ties to blue-collar unions help workers advance, but only to lower-level positions in left-leaning parties. We conclude that efforts to improve workers’ numerical representation should apply throughout the career ladder and focus on intra-party processes.

This article challenges prevailing national interpretations of solidarity by examining its colonial dimensions. Employing the Durkheimian school as a historical lens, I demonstrate how the colonial context during the Third Republic shaped the emergence and application of solidarity as a scientific concept. Informed by colonial ethnographies, solidarity was not merely a sociological self-description within European nations; it also formed part of political agendas beyond Europe. I illustrate how Durkheim’s concept was utilized to enhance scientific understanding of colonized societies, aiding French colonial administrators in promoting developmentalist reforms. As national models extended internationally, solidarity evolved from social cohesion to economic integration within the international legal order. This progression toward modern solidarity—and the injustices it entailed—appeared inevitable, masking political struggles for self-determination. By critically recontextualizing solidarity, this analysis contributes to contemporary political theory debates, demonstrating its application in supporting an inclusive legal-economic agenda while failing to systematically confront colonial injustices.

This essay examines June Jordan’s design writings to elaborate a political theory of redesign in her work. I show that Jordan’s redesign offers political principles for reimagining space at multiple scales and speaks to the question of how more livable, beautiful worlds may be wrought from the material contexts in which we presently live. Against the grain of the dismantling of public goods in the late twentieth century, Jordan re-envisioned public city spaces and housing with dignity and room for human flourishing. Her primary barometer for design was the fullest expression of human aliveness—she insisted that the built environment should “[cherish] as it amplifies the experience of being alive.” Jordan’s visionary pragmatism anticipates what Deva Woodly calls the “radical Black feminist pragmatism” of the twenty-first century’s Movement for Black Lives and speaks to contemporary abolitionist thought and struggles over the future of public goods.

I argue that current normative discussions of the responsibility for structural injustice are marred by an inadequate socio-theoretical view of structures and their functioning. This view reduces the relation between structures and actions to one of constraint: structures mainly inhibit transformative action; transformative action can only come from outside structures. I offer an alternative view of structures and their functioning that, drawing on and extending Sewell’s and Haslanger’s conceptions of structures and Arendt’s view of action, shows that actions are structurally and publicly constituted—they acquire social meaning in relation to structures, in a process of public interpretation—which is why they can transform the structures where they originate. Responsibility to dismantle unjust structures should then be understood as “structural responsibility”: responsibility to act from one’s structural position in ways that can disrupt the mechanisms of structural maintenance.

The global justice debate has increasingly moved toward the analysis of concrete issues in global politics, such as trade, migration, or climate change. This raises a methodological question: should the demands of justice in these domains be theorized independently or in conjunction with one another? Integrationists have championed the latter approach, arguing that it is better suited to guide our practical judgments. In contrast, internalists maintain that each domain is governed by its own set of principles. This paper defends the plausibility of the internalist approach against integrationist challenges. By examining different interpretations of internalism, it first seeks to provide a clearer overview of the methodological dispute. It then analyzes various arguments for integrationism, showing that their implications are more limited than their proponents believe. Finally, it focuses on the question of practical guidance, highlighting the value of idealized domain-specific theorizing in guiding transitions toward just arrangements.

While political scientists regularly engage in spirited theoretical debates about elections and voting behavior, few have noticed that elected politicians also have theories of elections and voting. Here, we investigate politicians’ positions on eight central theoretical debates in the area of elections and voting behavior and compare politicians’ theories to those held by ordinary citizens. Using data from face-to-face interviews with nearly one thousand politicians in 11 countries, together with corresponding surveys of more than twelve thousand citizens, we show that politicians overwhelmingly hold thin, minimalist, “democratic realist” theories of voting, while citizens’ theories are more optimistic and policy oriented. Politicians’ theoretical tendencies—along with their theoretical misalignment from citizens—are remarkably consistent across countries. These theories are likely to have important consequences for how politicians campaign, communicate with the public, think about public policy, and represent their constituents.

Regularization can improve statistical estimates made with highly correlated data. However, any regularization procedure embeds assumptions about the data generating process that can have counterintuitive consequences when those assumptions are untenable. We show that rather than simply shrinking estimates, regularization can reopen backdoor causal paths, inflating the estimates of some effects, and in the wrong circumstances, even reversing their direction. Recently, Cavari and Freedman (2023), argued that declining cooperation rates in surveys have inflated measures of mass polarization. We show that this finding is driven by large penalty terms in their regularized regressions, which leads to the estimates being confounded with time. Alternative methods do not show a clear positive or negative effect of declining cooperation on estimated levels of mass polarization.

When do public policies influence citizens’ political attitudes and behavior, and among whom? We study this question using one of the largest social provision programs in the United States: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). We exploit the staggered roll-out of state-level EITC programs to estimate the causal effect of the program on elections, voter behavior, and attitudes about the government. Contrary to predictions from the policy feedback literature, we show that the credit leads to higher vote shares and approval ratings for the implementing governor. These effects are temporally limited to the first years of the credit’s availability and dissipate over time. Taken together, our results offer new insights about the conditions under which particularistic economic policies affect political outcomes.

This article formulates an original account of the Enlightenment through an interpretation of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, a landmark work of transatlantic anti-colonial thought. It defends a dialectical account of the Enlightenment as a singular transatlantic historical process whose content and critical import changes across space and time. In The Black Jacobins, James shows the Enlightenment’s revolutionary and emancipatory political legacy by staging the dialectic of the Enlightenment in a colonial situation defined by a slave-plantation economy. James illustrates the Enlightenment’s political legacy as a “concrete universal” that has particular and singular aspects, each with its own unique contours. In doing so, the article considers other themes at the center of both historical and contemporary political theory such as how to best conceptualize colonialism; the traveling and misplacement of Enlightened ideas; and the critical importance of the dialectical legacy and critical theory in these efforts.

Statutory minimum wages have become an important tool for regulating labor markets. One major reason is the decline in collective wage bargaining. But how can minimum wages be justified? We show that their best justification does not lie in their economic effects but in the respect for social contributors that they express. The article takes an innovative interdisciplinary approach, bridging political philosophy and comparative political economy. We first discuss existing justifications in political practice and theory. We then show how a distinctive and robust justification should regard minimum wages as paying necessary respect to those who fulfill their obligation to contribute to social cooperation. Our justification thus suggests a new concept of economic citizenship and advances recognition theory applied to work. We outline further implications of the argument, such as the desirability of setting minimum wages through collective bargaining, and a tentative case for a maximum income.

We combine newly collected election data with records of public denials of the results of the 2020 election to estimate the degree to which election-denying Republican candidates over- or underperformed other Republicans in 2022 in statewide and federal elections. We find that the average vote share of election-denying Republicans in statewide races was approximately 3.2 percentage points lower than their co-partisans after accounting for state-level partisanship. However, we find no such underperformance on aggregate for U.S. House elections, perhaps due to the more-partisan nature of many House districts. Together, the results suggest that the types of candidates in American elections who take more-extreme positions tend to underperform, but that these performance gaps are relatively small in the present, polarized political environment.

The coloniality of power stands as a major framework for theorizing race within the context of Latin America, providing an influential account of the origin of race in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Without abandoning the task of theorizing the ways in which race functions in Latin America, this article asks: what is obscured by an insistence on 1492 as the moment when race emerged, and what different understandings of race can be made available by connecting the colonization of the Americas to a different set of temporal and spatial referents? Specifically, I develop a “prismatic” approach to analyze the impact of fifteenth-century Iberian blood purity statutes on the development of race without positing these as the new, singular origin of race. This article thus suggests an alternative genealogy of racialization while providing a critical engagement with the coloniality of power’s account of race.

We investigate how hardships affect rural politics, considering the case of hospital closures. In the last two decades, more than two hundred rural hospitals have closed their doors or drastically reduced their services. Drawing from resource models of voting, our hypothesis is that personal- and community-level deprivations brought about by hospital closures should reduce election turnout. Empirical tests pair geographic information on the location of open and closed hospitals with data from state voter files to create a panel of over 10 million rural residents for the 2016, 2018, and 2020 national elections. Results show that individuals whose nearest hospital closed prior to the proximate election were less likely to vote than their unaffected counterparts. These effects are strongest for older and lower-income residents, but they decay over time so that voting likelihood resembles a pre-closure baseline within 12 months.

This article reframes understandings of pluralism in democratic theory by showing that the management of late and post-colonial identitarian conflict was integral to its incorporation into twentieth-century political science. It does so by reconstructing the central but underexamined place of theories of consociational democracy in efforts to reform South Africa’s apartheid constitution in the 1970s and 80s. Consociational democratic theory offered such promising resources for apartheid reform, it contends, because it entwined (a) a conception of social pluralism that redescribed apartheid’s racial hierarchy as identitarian difference with (b) a conception of institutional pluralism that curtailed the most transformative possibilities of decolonization through universal suffrage. Recovering pluralism’s colonial genealogies clarifies the conditions under which the recognition of identitarian diversity can function as a disavowal of racial domination, positioning democratic theory as an adjunct to projects of neo-colonial order.

The low value of reproductive labor, and the related “crisis of care,” are often attributed to gendered attitudes about work. This article traces this explanation to the attempted synthesis of Marxist and feminist theories of ideology in the 1970s and offers a sympathetic critique with implications for both contemporary theories of labor and the “new ideology critique.” It reconstructs the explanatory role of ideology in feminist analyses of unwaged housework and tracks its uptake in theories of “reproductive labor” more broadly, via what I call the “naturalization thesis.” While these analyses have been influential, I show that they do not provide a convincing account of either gender oppression or the low value of reproductive labor. I offer an alternative explanation for the latter rooted in labor processes and patterns of capital accumulation and argue for the reintegration of ideology critique with the critique of political economy.

This article develops an account of territorial justice to understand what is owed to people at risk of climate displacement. I argue that the aim of territorial justice is to secure a globally recognized status, the status of being an equal common possessor of the earth. As a common possessor, every inhabitant of the globe has a claim to a “place” in the world where they can access minimally just material conditions and political institutions, securely pursue their located practices, and exercise self-determination together with others. I apply this theory to generate prescriptions for a just policy response to the risk of climate displacement. Where possible, I argue that a just response should focus on mandatory global taxation to support in situ adaptation. In cases where relocation becomes inevitable, I outline the implications for how just relocation regime should be structured.

Civic associations underpin American democracy. How can politically cross-cutting associations engage members who hold divergent viewpoints amidst increasing partisan polarization and nationalization of politics? I examine this question in the context of labor unions, studying how unions engage members who hold conservative views at odds with some of the union’s political actions. Using original surveys of local union presidents, members, and non-members along with in-depth interviews in selected local unions, I show how local union leaders can foster norms of participation among politically cross-pressured members. Norms of participation increase conservative members’ perceptions of political representation and engagement in politics, including participation in the union’s political action committee and support for union political mobilization. These findings have implications for understanding civic associations and participation in an era of political division, as well as the role unions continue to play in politics.